Honey Moon

Honey Moon

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

(2013)

HONEY MOON

SUSAN ELIZABETH

PHILLIPS

Copyright © 1993 by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

ISBN: 0-671-73593-4

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
1 4
15
16
17
18
19
20

21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Epilogue

In memory of my father

A great roller coaster makes you find God when you ride it.

—Anonymous

The

Lift Hill

1980-1982

1

All that spring Honey prayed to Walt Disney. From her bedroom in the rear of the rusty old trailer that sat in a clump of pines behind the third hill of the Black Thunder roller coaster, she prayed to God and Walt and sometimes even Jesus in hopes that one of those powerful heavenly figures would help her out. With her arms resting on the bent track that held the room's only window, she gazed out through the sagging screen at the patch of night sky just visible over the tops of the pines.

"Mr. Disney, it's Honey again. I know that the Silver Lake Amusement Park doesn't look like much right now with the water level down so far you can see all the stumps and with the
Bobby Lee
sitting on the bottom of the lake right at the end of the dock. Maybe we haven't had more than a hundred people through the park in the past week, but that doesn't mean things have to stay this way."

Ever since the Paxawatchie County
Democrat
had printed the rumor that the Walt Disney people were thinking about buying the Silver Lake Amusement Park as a location for a South Carolina version of Disney World, Honey hadn't been able to think of anything else. She was sixteen years old, and she knew that praying to Mr. Disney was a childish thing to do (not to mention questionable theology for a Southern Baptist), but circumstances had made her desperate.

Now she ticked off the advantages she wanted Mr. Disney to consider. "We're only an hour from the interstate. And with some good directional signs, everybody on their way to Myrtle Beach would be sure to stop here with their kids. If you don't count the mosquitoes and the humidity, the climate is good.

The lake could be real pretty if your employees made the Purlex Paint Company stop dumping their toxics in it. And those people who are carrying on your business now that you're dead could buy it real cheap. Could you use your influence with them? Could you somehow make them understand that the Silver Lake Amusement Park is just what they're looking for?"

Her aunt's thin, listless voice interrupted Honey's combination of prayer and sales presentation. "Who're you talkin' to, Honey? You don't have a boy in that bedroom, do you?"

"Yeah, Sophie," Honey replied with a grin. "I got about a dozen in here. And one of 'em is gettin' ready

to show me his dingdong."

"Oh, my, Honey. I don't think you should talk like that. It's not nice."

"Sorry." Honey knew she shouldn't bait Sophie, but she liked it when her aunt fussed over her. It didn't happen very often, and nothing ever came of it, but when Sophie fussed, Honey could almost pretend

she was her real mother instead of her aunt.

A burst of laughter sounded from the next room as the
Tonight Show
audience responded to one of Johnny's jokes about peanuts and President Carter. Sophie always had the television on. She said it kept her from missing Uncle Earl's voice.

Earl Booker had died a year and a half ago, leaving Sophie the owner of the Silver Lake Amusement Park. She hadn't exactly been a ball of fire when he was alive, but it was even worse now that he was dead, and Honey was pretty much in charge of things. As she drew back from the window, she knew it wouldn't be much longer before Sophie fell asleep. She never lasted much past midnight even though she hardly ever got out of bed before noon.

Honey propped herself up against the pillows. The trailer was hot and airless.

Despite the fact that she was wearing only an orange Budweiser T-shirt and a pair of underpants, she couldn't get comfortable. They used to have a window air conditioner, but it had broken down two summers ago just like everything else, and they couldn't afford to replace it.

Honey glanced at the dial on the clock sitting next to the bed she shared with Sophie's daughter, Chantal, and felt a twinge of alarm. Her cousin should have been home by now. It was Monday night, the park was closed, and there wasn't anything to do. Chantal was central to Honey's backup plan if Mr. Disney's employees didn't buy the park, and Honey couldn't afford to misplace her cousin, not even for an evening.

Swinging her feet down off the bed onto the cracked linoleum, she reached for the pair of faded red shorts she'd worn that day. She was small-boned, barely five feet tall, and the shorts were hand-me-downs from Chantal. They were too big for her hips and hung in baggy folds that made her toothpick legs seem even skinnier than they were. But vanity was one of the few faults Honey didn't possess, so she paid no attention.

Although Honey couldn't see it herself, she in fact had some cause for vanity.

She had thickly lashed light blue eyes topped by dark slashes of brow. Her heart-shaped face held small cheekbones dusted with freckles and a pert little excuse for a nose. But she hadn't quite grown into her mouth, which was wide and framed by full lips that always reminded her of a big old sucker fish. For as long as she could remember, she had hated the way she looked, and not just because people had mistaken her for a boy until her small breasts had poked through, but because no one wanted to take a person seriously who looked so much like a child. Since Honey very much needed to be taken seriously, she had done her best to disguise every one of her physical assets with a perpetually hostile scowl and a generally belligerent attitude.

After slipping on a pair of flattened blue rubber flip-flops that had long ago conformed to the bottoms of her feet, she shoved her hands through her short, chewed hair. She performed this action not to straighten it but to scratch a mosquito bite on her scalp. Her hair was light brown, exactly the same color as her name. It liked to curl, but she seldom gave it the opportunity. Instead, she cut it whenever it got in her way, using whatever reasonably sharp implement happened to be handy: a pocketknife, a pair of pinking shears, and, on one unfortunate occasion, a fish sealer.

She closed the door behind her as she slipped out into a short, narrow hallway carpeted with an indoor-outdoor remnant patterned in brown and gold lozenges that also covered the uneven floor in the combination living and eating area.

Just as she had predicted, Sophie had fallen asleep on an old couch upholstered in a worn tan fabric printed with faded tavern signs, American eagles, and thirteen-star flags. The perm Chantal had given her mother hadn't turned out too well, and Sophie's thin salt-and-pepper hair looked dry and vaguely electrified. She was overweight, and her knit top outlined breasts that had fallen like water balloons to opposite sides of her body.

Honey regarded her aunt with a familiar combination of exasperation and love.

Sophie Moon Booker was the one who should have been worrying about her daughter's whereabouts, not Honey. She was the one who should have been thinking about how they were going to pay all those bills that were piling up and how they were going to keep their family together without falling into the peckerhead welfare system. But Honey knew that getting mad at Sophie was just like getting mad at Sophie's daughter, Chantal. It didn't do any good.

"I'm going out for a while."

Sophie snorted in her sleep.

The night air was heavy with humidity as Honey jumped down off the crumbling concrete step. The trailer's exterior was a particularly jarring shade of robin's-egg blue, improved only by the dulling film of age. Her flip-flops sank into the sand, and grit settled between her toes. As she moved away from the trailer, she sniffed. The June night smelled like pine, creosote, and the disinfectant they used in the toilets. All of those smells were overlaid by the distant, musty scent of Silver Lake.

As she passed beneath a series of weathered Southern yellow-pine support columns, she shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts and told herself that this time she would keep going. This time she wouldn't stop and look. Looking made her think, and thinking made her feel like the inside of a week-old bait bucket. She moved doggedly ahead for another minute, but then she stopped anyway. Turning back the way she had come, she craned her neck and let her gaze move along the sweeping length of Black Thunder.

The roller coaster's massive wooden frame stood silhouetted against the night sky like the skeleton of a prehistoric dinosaur. Her eyes traveled up the steep incline of Black Thunder's mountainous lift hill and down that heart-stopping sixty-degree drop. She traced the slopes of the next two hills with their chilling dips all the way to the final spiral that twisted down in a nightmare whirlpool over Silver Lake itself. Her heart ached with an awful combination of yearning and bitterness as she took in the three hills and the steeply banked death spiral.

Everything had begun to go wrong for them the summer Black Thunder had stopped running.

Even though the Silver Lake Amusement Park was small and old-fashioned compared to places like Busch Gardens and Six Flags over Georgia, it had something none of the others could claim. It had the last great wooden roller coaster in the South, a coaster some enthusiasts considered more thrilling than the legendary Coney Island Cyclone. Since it was built in the late 1920s, people had come from all over the country to ride Black Thunder. For legions of roller-coaster enthusiasts, the trip to Silver Lake had been a religious pilgrimage.

After a dozen rides on the legendary wooden coaster, they would visit the park's other more mundane attractions, including spending two dollars a person to take a cruise up and down Silver Lake on the paddle wheeler
Robert E. Lee
.

But the
Bobby Lee
had fallen victim to disaster just like Black Thunder.

Almost two years ago, on Labor Day 1978, a wheel assembly had snapped off Black Thunder's rear car, separating it from the other cars and sending it hurtling over the side. Luckily no one had been hurt, but the State of South Carolina had closed down the roller coaster that same day, and none of the banks would finance the expensive renovation the state required before the ride could be reopened. Without its famous attraction, the Silver Lake Amusement Park had been dying a slow and painful death.

Honey walked farther into the park. On her right a bug-encrusted light bulb illuminated the deserted interior of the Dodgem Hall, where the battered fiberglass cars sat in a sleeping herd waiting for the park to open at ten the next morning. She passed through Kiddieland, with its miniature motorcycles and fire trucks sitting motionless on their endless circular tracks. Further on, the Scrambler and Tilt-a-Whirl rested from their labors. She paused in front of the House of Horror, where a Day-Glo mural of a decapitated body gushing phosphorescent blood from its severed neck stretched over the entryway.

"Chantal?"

There was no answer.

Removing the flashlight from its hook behind the ticket booth, she walked purposefully up the ramp into the House of Horror. In the daytime the ramp vibrated and a loudspeaker emitted hollow groans and shrill screams, but now everything was quiet. She entered the Passageway of Death and shone her light on the seven-foot hooded executioner with his bloody ax.

"Chantal, you in here?"

She heard only silence. Brushing through the artificial cobwebs, she passed the chopping block on her way to the Rat Den. Once inside, she shone her flashlight around the small room. Scores of glowing red eyes looked back at her from the one hundred and six snarling gray rats that lurked in the rafters and hung from invisible wires over her head.